Frederick Charles Shrady


Frederick Charles Shrady was an American painter and sculptor, best known for his religious sculptures.

Biography

The son of the sculptor Henry Merwin Shrady, he graduated from the Choate School in Connecticut, studied painting at the Art Students' League in New York City, and attended Oxford University in England. He moved to Paris, France, in 1931, studied under Yasushi Tanaka, and lived and painted there for nine years. He was awarded a medal at the 1937 Paris Exposition.
He married in Europe, and returned to the United States in 1940, with his wife and young son, Henry.
He joined the U.S. Army during World War II, and served as one of the Monuments Men, helping to retrieve looted art. In Bavaria, he met Maria Louise Likar-Waltersdorff, an Austrian translator with the U.S. Army Fine Arts and Monuments Department, who became his second wife. They had six children.
He converted from Episcopalianism to Roman Catholicism in 1948, and turned to painting religious subjects. In 1950, he completed his first sculpture.
Clare Boothe Luce's 19-year-old daughter, Ann Clare Brokaw, a student at Stanford University, was killed in a 1944 automobile accident. In her memory, Luce built Saint Ann's Chapel near the campus in Palo Alto, California, and commissioned works of art to adorn it. Shrady's colossal bronze sculpture on the building's facade, Saint Ann and the Virgin Mary, portrays the mother teaching her young daughter how to read.
He was commissioned by the Dominican Order in the Holy Land to model twelve bas-relief panels depicting The Life of Mary for the doors of the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, Israel.
In 1982, Pope John Paul II commissioned him to create a statue of Our Lady of Fatima for the Vatican Gardens. He was the first American artist to receive such a papal commission.
He was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government, and was made a Knight Equestrian by the Order of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Israel.
Maria Shrady wrote a number of religious books, including a children's book about Mother Teresa with illustrations by her husband.
Shrady's papers are at Georgetown University.

Selected works

Paintings